Collecting writings from 17 Northerners and Southerners who lived through the years prior to the Civil War, this book explores the dramatic changes in thinking about the nature and value of the American Union between 1846 and 1861, impelling the southern states to declare independence and the remaining states to fight them in the bloodiest war in the nation's history. Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis write of nationalism and states' rights; Harriet Beecher Stowe plans Uncle Tom's Cabin to be an outcry against slavery, while Frederick Douglass and Charlotte Forten Grimké write of the need to end that "evil institution"; and William Gilmore Simms argues after the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1850 that the North seems intent on preventing the South from expanding its territory.